Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)
Scrupulous, smoothly presented biography of a flamboyant Regency aristocrat.
Moving at the center of a decadent society, Georgina, sixth Duchess of Bedford (1781–1853), had it all: wealth, position, personal magnetism, and a measure of political influence. She was, writes British political journalist Trethewey in this admiring portrait, a social climber, but not a snob, thanks to the influence of her unconventional mother, a Scottish noblewoman who taught her that “with great privilege came responsibilities to those who were less fortunate.” Yet Jane, Duchess of Gordon, also made sure her children married well, in Georgina's case accomplishing through the most exquisite diplomatic delicacy a union with John, Duke of Bedford. The marriage was mutually supportive and deeply affectionate, though that didn't preclude the Duchess's long liaison with the artist Edwin Landseer. “Affairs were commonplace in Regency society,” writes Trethewey; though outward conventions could not be violated, the Duke was “a loving but not a passionate man and so jealousy was not a natural emotion to him.” The author covers considerable political territory: feuds between the Whigs and Tories, the Bedfords’ support of Queen Caroline over the Prince Regent, the satirical hammering the couple took in the pages of John Bull, the fight against Parliamentary bribery spearheaded by Georgina’s stepson. But mostly this is the story of a Regency family’s “unashamedly hedonistic” lifestyle, much of it centered around their 3,000-acre estate at Woburn (“run like the most exclusive hotel”), with more intimate moments at Endsleigh, their palatial rustic cottage. The death of the Duke brought less secure financial times for Georgina, but Trethewey suggests she handled those with her usual aplomb. The fact that she was an attentive mother—unusual for a woman of her class—also helps attract readers to the appealing duchess.
Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7472-5476-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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